


A History of An American Icon (with commentary from said icon)

by FriendshipCastle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Sexism, sitting around reading history books goes horribly awry, the fucked up parts of history that they don't tell you about in grade school
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 13:02:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2508815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendshipCastle/pseuds/FriendshipCastle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This sat in my drafts all summer.  I'm putting it up.  Co-written with my buddy Hiccup because we would just love to get a look at the history books they publish about Captain America in the Marvelverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A History of An American Icon (with commentary from said icon)

> It is fitting that one of the greatest American heroes of the 20th century shares a birthday with America. Steven Rogers was born July 4th, 1918 to Irish immigrants Joseph and Sarah Rogers. He grew up on the Lower East Side in Brooklyn, New York, in an apartment building a step above a tenement slum. His best friend was James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, a man named for one of the worst Presidents of the United States.

“Oh, hey now,” Steve murmured.

> With Rogers, Barnes would redeem and bring honor to that name, but first they had to part ways and Rogers had to endure transformations physical, mental, and emotional.
> 
> Joseph Rogers died when his son was a child. Rogers was raised by his mother, who never remarried. Rogers was a sickly boy, that much is clear from his repeated applications to join the army in the midst of the draft for World War II. His list of ailments on one of his enlistment applications reads:
> 
> Asthma  
>  Scarlet Fever  
>  Rheumatic Fever  
>  Sinusitis  
>  Chronic or frequent colds  
>  High blood pressure

Steve winced and turned the page.

> Palpitation or pounding in heart  
>  Easy fatiguability  
>  Heart trouble  
>  Nervous trouble of any sort  
>  Has had household contact with tuberculosis patient  
>  Parent/sibling with diabetes, cancer, stroke, or heart disease.1
> 
> There is further evidence that Rogers also had scoliosis and astigmatism, was partially deaf, suffered stomach ulcers, and possessed flat feet.2
> 
> Such an extensive list prevented Rogers from joining the army no fewer than four times. He applied again and again, a compulsive desire to serve his country driving him to work his way through various cities around New York, lying on the forms about his address in order to get another chance to enlist. He lied about his height and weight as well, adding several inches and pounds on the forms that did not exist in real life.3 In reality, Steve Rogers was 5’6’’ and 95 pounds and picked fights he knew he could never win. I like to think he picked up his rudimentary medical skills from his painful experiences in back alleys and high school locker rooms, where he was bullied to the point of broken bones on more than one occasion.
> 
> Rogers’s mother, Sarah, died of pneumonia when Rogers was in his late teens. Rogers continued to live in their apartment at 14047 Brooklyn Street, Brooklyn, NY, which has since been replaced by a Starbucks. His friend Barnes repeatedly tried to get him to move into a new apartment, but Rogers refused. Instead, after a year of art school, he took up work in comics, laboring over the propaganda that would remain a part of his career throughout the war and

“This is really bizarre,” Steve said, flipping back to the cover of the book.

“You’re only two pages in,” Sam said, glancing up from his well-thumbed biography on Ida B. Wells.

“But it’s already weird, Sam,” Steve said, glaring at the embossed letters that took over the entire cover: _Behind the Star-Spangled Shield: A Social History and Iconographic Analysis of the First True American Superhero_ by Gilbert Penderghast, PhD.

Sam squinted at the book. “Is it the title? I think they missed out on some good name puns, myself. Something playing on ‘Cap’ would’ve been great.”

“Popping Off the Cap?” Clint offered. He looked like he was asleep, sprawled over most of the window seat in Sam and Steve’s apartment with the rain sliding down the windows behind him, but clearly he was awake enough to hear them and contribute.

“That sounds filthy,” Natasha said from her corner of the living room, where she had taken over and built herself a pillow fortress. “I think Respectfully Tipping the Cap sounds more… him.”

Clint opened his eyes. “Respectfully Tipping the Cap? Weak.” He picked at a band-aid on his elbow. “What about A Brand New Cap?” 

“My Years as a Capsicle,” Natasha said. 

“Cap’n Tightpants.” 

“Roger That.”

“Now who sounds filthy?” Clint said, flicking the band-aid at her. “Crunchatize Me, Cap’n.” 

“Yeah, okay, none of those,” Sam said. “But seriously, why do you not like it?”

Steve shook his head and flipped the book over to read the back blurb, which was nothing but high praise from fellow historians and review journals. “Because I’m just facts all of a sudden.”

“Well, I mean, it came out a decade before they warmed you up in the giant S.H.I.E.L.D microwave or whatever that was,” Sam pointed out. “No one knew you were gonna come back. He couldn’t exactly sit you down for an interview. He was just going off records of what you’d done.”

“It’s really wrong, though,” Steve said. “It’s bad analysis. I can remember some of this stuff but this man makes it sound like I was some sort of compulsive thrill-seeker or something.”

“Are you saying that you aren’t?” Natasha said, raising her eyebrows.

“Tasha tells me you jump out of planes without a parachute,” Clint said.

Steve frowned at both of them. Natasha winked before she resumed turning the pages of what the battered cover proclaimed to be _Братья Карамазовы_. 

“I guess it looks different from the outside,” Steve grumbled. “I just wanted to do my duty and fix the world. It was simple back then.” He settled himself more comfortably in Sam’s La-Z-Boy and propped the book on his chest, peeling the cover open to the table of contents.

> Chapter 1: All-American Beginnings  
>  Chapter 2: Stark Confessions  
>  Chapter 3: Building A Man  
>  Chapter 4: A Dancing Monkey

“Wait, what?” Steve said.

> Chapter 5: Burning Gaze

“Wait, _what_?” Steve said, even louder. “That sounds like a romance title! What’s that chapter even about?”

Clint snickered. Natasha’s small half-smile grew wider, though her eyes never left her book.

“Okay, now I regret not doing the class reading,” Sam said, craning his neck to see the page.

> Chapter 6: Mission: Reunion  
>  Chapter 7: A Howling Good Time

“Oh, _no_.” Steve shut his eyes in horror.

“Can he not swear, Tasha?” Clint asked. “Like, he physically can’t swear?”

“He certainly tries not to,” Natasha said. “Get your phone out. We’ll see how much the footage of Cap’s first curse will sell for once he gets to Chapter Twelve.”

Steve turned the page to see what Chapter Twelve was called.“‘Stepping Out Of Her Place’? What’s that— Oh. Oh gosh. It’s Peggy, isn’t it?”

Natasha hummed the affirmative.

“He didn’t swear,” Clint said, sounding disappointed.

“He’ll read it,” Natasha said. “Then he’ll start going off.”

Steve flipped back to his place on the second page. He blinked at the letters and sentences running together, compartmentalizing and reducing his youth to a few short paragraphs. 

Steve used to hear the old piano teacher across the alley giving lessons to hopeless new students and old prodigies who wanted a fresh set of ears. That wasn’t in the book. This PhD didn’t know how good Steve’s mom’s stew was. The smell would carry for blocks and Steve would start running, even though it made him wheeze, so he could taste that stew a little sooner. And then, when Steve was working at the comic book assembly line and coming home to an empty apartment, Bucky tried to make it one day at his mom’s place. Steve walked home very slowly and still he wheezed, his breath catching at the lump in his throat as he climbed up one more flight of stairs than he usually did to knock on Bucky’s mother’s door. It tasted fine but the smell was as close to perfect as anything Steve had ever smelled since his mother died, her lungs crackling like bacon in a pan.

Did the professor know what it felt like to be sick for most of your life? Did he talk to someone with rheumatic fever? Did he try to understand what it was like when someone had pneumonia so badly that they were going to die, and they knew it, and you knew it, and then it happened? Medications these days were like magic. Steve couldn’t get over the fact that polio now had a cure. No more children trapped in Iron Lungs. They could go out and play now. Allergies had gotten worse but so had the medications that combated them. Steve just suffered when he was a kid. He was glad that most people today didn't have to have to stick it out, breathing air that felt like glue, fainting often and ending up with scraped cheeks and possible concussions from hitting the ground too hard. Why did this PhD skip over that kind of stuff? The broken bones from his many, many fights weren’t fun. There wasn’t any time to heal, after all. He was trying to earn money. He was trying to make a life for himself. He just happened to piss off a lot of people along the way and he wasn’t going to take that lying down, was he?

“Sam? Why do you even have this book?” Steve asked

Sam coughed. “I, uh. I didn’t always sell my class books back in college.”

“This was a _textbook_?” Steve yelped.

“Yeah, sorry man. I took American Media. It fulfilled a social science requirement.” Sam raised both his hands in the face of Steve’s horror. “Does it help to remind you that I didn’t do any of the reading?”

“Keep going, Cap,” Natasha murmured, settling deeper into her nest of pillows. Her little smirk was wicked. “It’s an interesting book.”

“Oh, jeez,” Steve said, easing back in the chair until it started tilting for him. He turned to Chapter 3, morbidly curious about what they had to say about his construction. He didn’t want to read about childhood or, for that matter, Bucky’s.

> Upon failing to pass the military’s physical requirements, Rogers was invited to volunteer for “Operation: Rebirth,” a project initiated by the US government and administered by the Army to create a line of Super-Soldiers to be used during World War II. The Army worked in collaboration with Dr. Abraham Erskine (under the codename “Joseph Reinstein”), who ultimately created the Super-Soldier serum.1 The serum itself was less of an actual “serum” and more a number of processes, including both a chemical portion and a Vita Ray treatment. The exact components of the serum are unknown, as Erskine was killed only moments after Rogers was successfully transformed into Captain America. Erskine’s murder resulted in the loss of a significant portion of his research, as he never fully documented all of his research to recorded notes. The process has never been successfully repeated, and there is some debate as to whether the serum, if successfully re-created, would work reliably on any man or whether it would be successful in only one of four participants. 
> 
> The serum itself is meant to increase the attributes of the recipient to the peak of human potential—practically superhuman. It enhances not only physical capabilities, but also affects capabilities including mind, speed, durability, healing, eye sight, and immune system (including aging). Dr. Erskine stated his belief that the establishment of man’s maximum potential through the serum was the realization of the potential for the next step in human (non-mutant) evolution for the regular man—meaning that one day in the far future, humanity would reach this level on their own.2 Most recent experiments seeking such enhancements have had catastrophic results—most notably, the explosive reaction of Dr. Bruce Banner, which will be discussed later in the chapter.3

“Some day I’m going to have to ask Bruce exactly what happened with those gamma rays,” Steve said. “It doesn’t feel right to read about it in a history book if I know the man.”

“You might not want to know, Cap,” Natasha said.

Steve shrugged and kept reading.

> Wilfred Nagel took over the American Super-Soldier project following Erskine’s death. In an attempt to create a working, mass-production version of Erskine’s formula, 300 African-American soldiers were taken from Camp Cathcart an subjected to potentially fatal experiments at an undisclosed location. Only five men survived the original trials (most prominently Isaiah Bradley—see _Truth: Red, White, and Black_ by Baker and Morales for further reading); the remaining hundreds of test subjects left at Camp Cathcart, including the camp’s commander, were executed in the name of secrecy. Their families were told that they had died in battle. 4

“They did _what_?” Steve gasped, lurching forward so hard that he jerked the La-Z-Boy out of laze-mode.

“What is it? What is it?” Sam asked, craning his neck.

“There’s some eugenics stuff in here,” Steve whispered.

“Oh, that Cathcart shit,” Natasha said. Her voice was grim.

“Cathcart?” Clint asked.

Natasha gave him a look. “Nagel and his racist projects.”

Clint winced. “Oh, fuck. Yeah, I remember that. That was fucked up. The guy didn't talk about it nearly as much as he should have.”

“How have you all read this?” Steve wailed.

“Coulson made me,” Clint said.

“When I knew you’d be coming back, I started gathering intel,” Natasha said.

“Like I said, I haven’t read it,” Sam said. “Can I borrow that after you?” 

“This is… there aren’t words for this,” Steve said.

“You know, I remember learning about Cathcart from my mom,” Sam said. “They wouldn’t even teach it to us in school. Whatever that historian got wrong, at least he’s putting that out there.”

“Erskine never wanted this,” Steve said. “He would have hated that people even tried… There aren’t words for this.”

Sam shut his book around a scrap of paper, stood, and patted Steve on the shoulder as he moved towards the kitchen. “Anyone else feel like tea? I’m making tea.”

“Cocoa, please!” Clint called.

“Do you have black tea?” Natasha asked.

“Yeah, I have ‘em both,” Sam said. “Steve?”

Steve shook his head. He swallowed hard and looked back down at the book. 

“You don’t look so good, Cap,” Clint said.

“It was sick men, Steve,” Natasha said. Her voice was low and intense, the kind of tone that demanded attention. “The world’s full of them. It’s why people like you get so much attention. You don’t hide anything because you have nothing you need to hide, and people appreciate that. You’re proof that the whole world isn’t like Cathcart.”

“But Erskine,” Steve said, closing his eyes.

Natasha looked at Clint, who shrugged. 

Sam poked his head around the corner. “He may not have wanted his research used like that but humanity’s flawed, Steve. Hell, you remember how S.H.I.E.L.D made a deal with the devil when it came to Hydra scientists and that Operation: Paperclip mess. You didn’t cause this. Neither did Erskine. Like Natasha said, it’s sick men. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You want green tea or orange?”

Steve rubbed his eyes hard. “Orange. Please. Thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Sam ducked back into the kitchen.

“I suggest you skip that section,” Natasha said to Steve. “It’s not worth your time. The whole project wasn’t worth the time it took.”

“It’s history, though,” Steve said. “It’s a secret history, too, apparently. It's something worth knowing.”

“It’s not going to fix it if you read about it now, though,” Natasha said. “There’s some better books about it if you really want to pursue it.”

“Tea’s up!” Sam called from the kitchen. “And Clint, I don’t have mini-marshmallows so don’t go complaining about it, all right?”

“Bet he ate them all,” Clint whispered. 

Natasha threw one of her pillows at him and took her black tea from Sam. She smirked at the mug. “How many people give you bird mugs for Christmas nowadays, Sam?”

“Too damn many,” Sam said, passing Clint his hot chocolate. 

“Thanks, I guess,” Clint grumbled theatrically, slurping his drink.

Sam put a mug of orange tea by Steve’s elbow and then sat down on his couch and picked up his biography again. “Take a sip, Steve. Calm down. History’s still gonna be waiting there. You keep skimming, okay? You have a whole other side of yourself to discover in there, then you can move on to all the fucked up shit that went down while you were... indisposed.”

Steve sighed and turned ahead in the book, pausing for a moment on the ten-page glossy photography insert that addressed Captain America merchandise and the images of him that had circulated during the time period. He ran a finger down the page, snorting at the war bonds ad. He frowned when he saw the trading cards. The source of these scans was credited to a “P. Coulson, private collector.”

Steve flicked to the next page of text and started reading.

> not just a propaganda icon but, as the title of this chapter indicates, a ‘pop icon of the age.’ Rogers had worked in the comic book industry while seeking to enlist, which brought him to the front lines of consumable media. Comic books were in their golden age at the time, and while Rogers did not achieve enough recognition to be singled out and credited as an artist, plenty of comics were made about him in later years. He was the world’s first real-life superhero and with a marketing team behind him, he waged an ideological war in the hearts and minds of his nation.
> 
> Beyond the propaganda of war bond endorsements (which are covered more extensively in Chapter 4), comics, trading cards, and merchandise, Rogers himself was heavily influenced by popular media at the time. He had a fascination with filmmaking and watched many of the new movies (and ‘talkies’) emerging in theaters. Judging from the references he made in his letters to Barnes, he kept abreast of contemporary literature, both bestselling and medical.13
> 
> That is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Rogers’ personal life. For a man with such a weak constitution, he was very willing to surrender his health to benefit his country. While the man was not a medical scholar—or indeed, a scholar of any kind—

“Oh, hey now,” Steve said.

“Hm?” Sam grunted, looking up from his biography.

“Said I’m not a scholar,” Steve said.

“You aren’t,” Natasha pointed out.

“I went to school!”

“Art school,” Clint said. He and Natasha shared a smile.

“I don’t like his tone,” Steve said, shaking the book meaningfully, “and I don’t like yours, either.”

Natasha winked at him and Clint tucked himself back against the window seat and let out an obviously fake snore. Steve went back to reading.

> —or, indeed, a scholar of any kind—the man knew about the twists and turns of medical progress. Of course, he had a personal stake in the outcome of many of the new experiments in the field of medicine, but I still believe it is interesting to note his willingness to offer up his body to science. He was seeking a cure for weakness

“What the hell?” Steve snapped. “This man doesn’t understand anything!”

“Dang, ” Clint said to Natasha. “I should’ve listened to you about filming his swearing.”

Natasha glanced up and eyed Steve’s progress in the book. “No, he went off earlier than I expected. Probably that chapter on his sexuality.”

Steve’s head jerked up. “What? That’s private! Who’s writing about that?”

“Man, I have got to read that book next,” Sam said.

Natasha nodded at the book in Steve’s hands. “Chapter Nine, Cap.”

“No, no, no,” Steve said, turning redder and redder as the pages shuddered past under his thumb. He hit the beginning of Chapter Nine and read aloud, “‘Confirmed Bachelor’? The chapter is called ‘Confirmed Bachelor’? What does he mean by that?”

“Gay code,” Clint, Natasha, and Sam all said at the same time.

“I _know_ ,” Steve said. “I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, I _know_ what gay code is. I meant why is some professor writing about my sexuality! That’s no one’s business!”

“Unless they want it to be their business,” Natasha offered. “Or you want it to be someone’s business.”

Steve blushed even harder. “Well. Yes. But a whole chapter on this!”

“There’s a whole book, actually,” Clint said. “Tasha told me. A whole anthology of essays wondering if you’re a queer icon or not. The title was actually pretty clever. It’s something about flags. I think the best essay title—”

“He only read the titles, not the essays,” Natasha added.

“The essay was definitely related to the thing you asked Papa Stark that he never stopped mocking,” Clint continued. He sat up, propped his chin on his fist, and grinned. “I think the chapter was ‘Do You Fondue?: Homosexual Subtext in the Posterboy for a Wholesome, Heteronormative America.’ You know, watching you discover that the nation was thinking about who you had sex with is way more important to me than taking a nap.”

“That’s saying something,” Natasha said. Clint stuck his tongue out at her. Steve ignored them and started skimming frantically.

> The psychological study Seduction of the Innocent, written by German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in 1954, and the formation of the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) that same year were the initial signals that Captain America’s previously unsullied image was no longer sacred. New York Magistrate Charles F. Murphy was the first to publicly call attention to the 1940s comic book character Captain America—as well as Steve Rogers himself—as a proponent of liberal integration, a male sex symbol, and a possible icon for homosexual men.8 The CMAA originally emerged to restrict the content of comic books at the time, which were excessively violent and graphic in order to appeal to an audience that had ‘grown up’ and grown out of the more wholesome superhero comics. Captain America was no longer a title in circulation, as it was deemed insensitive to use the image of a missing war hero (the questionable circumstances surrounding Rogers’ disappearance are covered more extensively in Chapter 10), but CMAA brought up his portrayal not only in comic books (where many objected to his ambiguous relationship with his sidekick, Barnes, but shockingly few objected to his depiction of fighting racist caricatures of Japanese soldiers)

“What did they put in my comics?” Steve wailed. “Oh my gosh, _no_! Why would they draw me doing that?”

“Is he already at the Tijuana Bibles part?” Natasha asked Sam.

Sam leaned over Steve’s shoulder. “I’m not seeing Tijuana anywhere, but it does say he fought racist caricatures.”

“Ah.” Natasha glanced at Clint. “Get ready for when he gets to the Tijuana Bible part.” Clint fumbled for his phone but stopped when Steve looked up at him.

“I know what Tijuana Bibles are,” he said. “I’m not stupid.”

“Did you collect them all?” Clint asked.

“No,” Steve said. “I just knew they existed. I was in a damn war. You can’t be a soldier and not know about… those kinds of things.”

“Did you find the ones of you?” Clint said.

“No,” Steve sighed. “We were always a bit ahead of everyone else when I was with the Howling Commandos. We didn’t really interact with other soldiers that much. Or, I guess we did, but I didn’t see anyone picking up one of those comics.”

“Coulson didn’t let them scan his collection of _those_ memorabilia,” Natasha said.

Sam stared at her. “Who the hell’s this Coulson guy? Should I install better locks on the windows or something? Is he gonna come creep into Steve's bedroom in the night?”

Natasha’s lips thinned. “He was an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. And a Captain America fanboy of the highest caliber. He died when Loki took New York.”

“Oh.” Sam cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“He was a good man,” Natasha said. “A little too obsessed with Steve, but good.”

“He helped design that first outfit Steve wore in New York,” Clint offered. “Made his ass look great.”

“Everyone’s asses looked great,” Sam said. “I mean, I was distracted by the alien forces invading our home and what kind of shit they were gonna try and pull, but in retrospect, those were some great asses.”

“We get special training,” Clint said.

Steve ignored them all. He flipped ahead in the book again and finally hit Chapter 12. It took him a moment to register the first words of the chapter.

> It is unclear if Rogers ever entered into a romantic and/or physical relationship with Peggy, but

“He called her Peggy,” Steve said. “Not Agent Carter. Even though I’m Rogers or Captain America, he only refers to her as Peggy.”

The room fell quiet, except for the little ding of Clint hitting RECORD on his phone.

> with Peggy, but it is abundantly clear that she had feelings for him. Her actions

“What about how I felt?” Steve said.

> Her actions in support of Rogers (particularly her encouragement of his plan to rescue his friend, Barnes, and the other captured soldiers who would later become the Howling Commandos) clearly express how she sought to fill a role similar to a wife or girlfriend. It is difficult to tell from black-and-white photographs at the time, but Peggy seemed to favor darker lipstick, a fashion statement at the time that signaled a woman supported the men fighting in the war.1 Her lipstick and her closeness with Rogers indicate that she had a deep, personal interest in fulfilling her ‘patriotic duty’

Steve shut the book.

“Oh shit,” Clint said.

“Don’t break my La-Z-Boy, man,” Sam said, reaching for Steve’s shoulder.

Natasha just smiled. “You know, I can find out what his office number is. He teaches at Vasser in the media studies program. It’s just five hours away if I’m driving.”

“It’s six if anyone else is behind the wheel,” Clint added.

Natasha looked Steve up and down. “I think we can try and get a senior discount on the toll road, too.”

“Dr. Penderghast and I need to talk,” Steve said. “Peggy deserves better than this.”

Natasha snapped her book shut and nodded. “I’ll drive.”

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Gilbert Penderghast, PhD, was holding office hours today. He’d brought a truly enormous cup of coffee with him, as well as a stack of his own research notes to distill. Looking busy often discouraged the undergrads from bothering him. He had another book draft due at the end of the month and there was a great deal of information coming out with regards to Captain America. 

Gilbert had thought it was safe, writing a book about an American media figure long gone. Then, even before he could put out a second edition of his book, the man had turned out to be alive. He’d started performing thrilling heroics almost immediately, too! Just blazing away in front of everyone! And now Gilbert was being called upon to prove he was an expert on a man who had an amazing public life and a virtually invisible private life. It had been great for his book sales but it was a lot of pressure for a man to be under. His beard was going grey prematurely (43 was too early to have grey hair, right?) and he was going to get a ulcer, according to his doctor, if he didn’t calm down.

Gilbert took a bracing swig of coffee and pulled out the green fountain pen that bitch of an ex-wife had given him three years ago, when she had been that bitch of a wife. He dragged the tallest stack of typewritten notes towards him. 

No one understood, no one really _got_ how hard it was to find a really good typewriter in this day and age. Everyone was all for the computers and touch screens and shit. Not Gilbert. He needed that typewriter. There was a texture to paper and the ink smacked on the page that you couldn’t get on a screen. And besides, Gilbert had stubby little fingers that made it hard to tap touch-screen buttons. You’d think they would make adjustments after all these years but no, not really. Typewriters were better. That bitch of an ex-wife had snickered about it, of course. 

He was really getting into the swing of editing, making corrections and reorganizing this draft, when he heard the steps. Sounded like a whole pack of the little fuckers. His was the third office from the end of the hall. He kept writing, silently willing the kids to stop down the hall. Anywhere. Not here. 

They kept coming. They were murmuring to each other. Lots of deep voices. The only girl sounded like a smoker, and a sarcastic one at that. When they were close enough for him to make out individual phrases, Gilbert switched his internal mantra from “Stop there, stop there, stop there” to “Keep going, keep going, keep going.”

Of course, his luck was complete shit. They stopped outside his door.

“Go on, man,” said one of the boys. 

“Aren’t you guys coming in, too?” said another one. He sounded kind of familiar. Gilbert was starting to feel pissed off. His door was only open a crack. Shouldn’t that be a signal that he was busy?

“We’re backup,” said the smoker girl.

“Go get him, champ,” said yet another boy. Jesus, how many of them were there? At least only one needed help.

“I can hear you,” Gilbert called. “Come in. Which class is this for?”

The door creaked open. Gilbert capped his pen and spun in his chair and then grabbed on to the arm rests as hard as he could.

Captain America was standing there, holding his book, and frowning.

This was the worst intersection of facts Gilbert had ever seen, and that included the moment he saw his wife and her lover in bed together (that had just been cliche).

“Um, hi,” Captain America said. He waved the book through the air as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He was wearing jeans, a rain jacket, and a shirt someone else had picked out for him. It was obvious that it was someone else’s shirt choice because it was baby blue, slightly too small for him, and had _Ask me about my pecs_ across the chest in Sharpie. Captain America tugged on the hem of this shirt until it covered his midriff more and coughed.

“Hi,” Gilbert managed, his voice three octaves higher than usual

“You wrote this book?” Captain America said.

“Yeah,” Gilbert wheezed.

“It’s not very accurate,” Captain America said.

“Oh?” was all Gilbert could say.

“I don’t think you know much about me,” Captain America said. 

Gilbert’s stomach twisted violently; he’d thought the same thing in recent weeks but he had tried to ignore that nagging voice.

Captain America waved a hand at the hard wooden chair Gilbert kept against the wall for those few students who fought their way to office hours. “May I sit?”

Gilbert couldn’t do more than nod and stare as the first Avenger careful balanced on that horrible little seat, book resting on his lap. 

“Did you talk to Agent Carter?” Captain America asked him.

“Who’s he?” Gilbert asked, then winced as Captain America’s frown deepened.

“You call her Peggy in this book,” Captain America said.

“Oh! Her! No, I didn’t. She’s been in a nursing home since—”

“She’s lucid,” Captain America said, “most of the time. She could have answered some of the questions you raise. She could have told you a lot of things. Did you not think it would be worth it to talk to her because she’s a woman?”

Gilbert was sweating. “Uh.”

“The chapter on the Howling Commandos is really short,” Captain America continued. “I read it on the way up here. I don’t get why you didn’t go into more detail about the fact that we were one of the first racially integrated units in the war. You could have gone into the history of Japanese internment camps and discrimination against Japanese-Americans and African-Americans during the war but instead you mostly just talked about our missions. I don’t think we were any more dedicated to the cause than the other brave men and women who fought, but our unit could have educated a lot of people about discriminatory practices in American history. And you didn’t go into too much detail about the camps where African-American soldiers were used in experiments trying to replicate Dr. Erskine’s serum. In your introduction, you keep talking about how this is a history of how Captain America impacted society. I think both of those events had a pretty big impact, don’t you? And yet no one talks about them. You didn’t.”

It was like being told off by a grandfather who looked like an apologetic underwear model. Gilbert’s mouth opened and closed but Captain America kept talking.

“And then there’s your treatment of P— of Agent Carter. You don’t go into detail about her work outside of how, how she inspired me, I guess. Or how she tried to continue my cause after I disappeared. She did a lot of things on her own, you know. She had seventy years to do more good work, she’s done a heck of a lot more than I have to improve the world. All I did was get put on a bunch of posters because I suddenly looked like the ideal American man, and then I got frozen in ice for more than half a century.” 

The guy shrugged then, his piercing blue eyes dropping to the book in his lap. “You could have done so much more with this, Professor Penderghast.” He looked back up at Gilbert and half-smiled. “I hope you do it with the next book. Or maybe put out a revised edition of this, or some supplemental material. I think you could say volumes about the people you only mention in this book. I’m not really a hero,” said the shining symbol of American strength and vitality. “The people around me were, though. Talk about them, would you?”

Gilbert realized after a moment that Captain America was actually expecting an answer. He took his first deep breath since the man entered his office and squeaked out, “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Captain America smiling was like a rainbow touching down on a basket of kittens. “Thanks, Professor Penderghast. Can I call you Gilbert?”

“Yeah,” Gilbert whispered. “Yeah, you can.”

Captain America held out his hand. “And you can call me Steve. Very nice to meet you. I’m glad you’re open to suggestion. I was worried that you’d be offended, me offering you advice, since I’m so obviously not an academic.”

Gilbert’s slowly growing smile vanished and he swallowed hard to keep from throwing up as Steve gripped his weak, academic fingers and shook his hand, firmly but not testing. It was the cleanest, strongest, most powerful and openhearted handshake Gilbert had ever experienced. He couldn’t shake the thought, though, that this man could easily crush all of the bones, from phalanges to metacarpals, with barely a sneeze’s worth of effort.

The fact that Captain America—Steve probably wasn’t thinking the same thing definitely said something about the man.

**Author's Note:**

> According to Wikipedia, President James Buchanan is totally accepted as the worst president of the United States due to his ineffectiveness. This surprised me. I would have guessed Nixon or Bush.
> 
> If you don't know Ida B. Wells you are missing out on some sweet historical figure information. Google her. She's super cool.
> 
> In their entirety, these are the chapters of Penderghast’s book (his name is a halfassed reference to the fantastic but entirely unrelated movie _Paranorman_ ):  
> Chapter 1: All-American Beginnings  
> Chapter 2: Stark Confessions (work with Howard and that scientist dude)  
> Chapter 3: Building A Man (serum chapter, Cathcart, Banner)  
> Chapter 4: A Dancing Monkey (propaganda chapter, emasculation)  
> Chapter 5: Burning Gaze (Carter’s motivational speech shit, Red Skull’s move)  
> Chapter 6: Mission: Reunion (rescue mission, fallout from that)  
> Chapter 7: A Howling Good Time (Howling Commandos. Racial integration, acceptance)  
> Chapter 8: Pop Icon of the Age (propaganda, influence on pop culture, influenced BY pop culture)  
> Chapter 9: ‘Confirmed Bachelor’ (sex symbol status, sexuality)  
> Chapter 10: Fallen Hero (last mission and death—unknown nature of this final mission because don’t know Tesseract)  
> Chapter 11: Mourning Period (reaction to death in America as well as overseas)  
> Chapter 12: Stepping Out of Her Place (Carter and S.H.I.E.L.D)  
> Chapter 13: Legendary Legacies (summation of research)
> 
> My cowriter, Hiccup, is a pun fiend. I did my best with the banter about better names for Steve’s bio between Natasha and Clint, but she came up with Barnes and Noble and Buckyngham Palace for Bucky. So sad I couldn’t figure out how to use them.
> 
> As a quiet signal that Penderghast is the worst (apart from the sexism surrounding Agent Peggy Carter’s name that I have _actually witnessed_ in an academic history book, and his highly unprofessional self-referential pedantry about his Steve headcanons), I had him use my least favorite form of possessive punctuation; “Rogers’s mother” instead of my preferred “Rogers’ mother”. Take THAT, asshole.
> 
> Natasha picked Steve's outfit. I don't even know, I thought it was funny then and it's still funny to me now.
> 
> Uhhhh yeah there's some dark shit in here that's apparently comics-canon? Hiccup sent it to me. Kinda freaked me out but considering what an asshole Penderghast is, it's impressive what he's chosen to include. I thought it was important. Steve's gonna have to sit down with a lot of calming tea and cookies and get through all the 'secret history' kind of books Sam and Natasha definitely have because they are socially aware.


End file.
